Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Testing drunk

(My first blog writing ever.)I've been thinking a long time that it's funny how many bugs I find by accident. Try to do something, make a mistake and boom - a bug is found.

Making the mistakes intentionally doesn't quite work - that's why they are called accidents I guess.. So I've thought of ways to make myself more prone to accidents, coming up with an apparent one; testing drunk. TUI (testing under the influence).So this I gotta try. More to come on that later.

On your question, I don't think there are right or wrong, just different kind of mistakes.

More important than that is that you make as various kind of mistakes as possible. Believe it or not, but just yesterday a tester of mine found a bug by accident, after making three mistakes in a row, and then when undoing his steps a problem was noticed -> one of the mistakes done (correctly) triggered an action on another object, but undoing the action didn't undo the action performed on the other object. And that was a valid semi-serious bug. How marvellous!

In the drunken part I see a problem though, as after mistakes are made, the problems might still not be that obvious and that's where perception should kick in. And drunken perception might not be that effective..

Fortunately there are other ways to make accidents happen that I have thought of (so my liver still has a chance). My tester fell into one which is trying to do many things at the same time. Trying to do stuff really quickly is another quite common one and pretty easy to mimic. Can you Miika think of any other ones?